Hi, I'm trying to install VL Light 5.9 on a Vaio PCG-505V (an old machine--Pentium I, 300 MHz, 4.3 GB, etc) from an external PCMCIA CDROM drive. On the setup screen, after choosing "find the media (HD/CDROM) and start the installation", I get "ERROR ERROR! I could not find the install media on the hard disk or the CDROM as well", followed by a little more text about the different options of installing.

I tried probedisk, but it only listed the hard disk (no CDROM). dmesg listed a whole lot of ACPI errors, and nothing about a drive other than the hard disk. I'm very new to linux installs, and I couldn't find much related info on this, so I'm not sure what to try next. Any ideas?

Ah, rats. I currently have an installation of Debian (etch) on there. What would be the route to go with that? I'm not terribly familiar with partitioning, but because of the limited hard disk space, I'd like to dedicate as much of the drive to the primary OS (hopefully VL) as possible.

I found some LiveCDs of VL, but none of VL Light--do you know where one might be (if that would be preferable to the above route, that is)? The machine doesn't have a floppy drive.

OK, after booting off the LiveCD, I get some initialization lines, but then there's a fatal error:

Fatal error occured - VLIGHT data not found.You are maybe using an unsupported boot device (eg. SCSI or old PCMCIA).Workaround: Copy the directory VLIGHT from your boot device to an IDE/SATA disk, eg. to /mnt/hda1/VLIGHT or C:\VLIGHT. Then try to boot again.

Should I go ahead and try that workaround?

I'm not sure if it'd be useful or not, but I should mention that the machine does have a USB port, which works fine with the current Debian install I have (in case a thumb drive would be useful for anything). And, you might've already guessed this, but there's no ethernet port on the machine. Thanks for all the help with this, by the way.

Since the box is already running Linux, you can use the "hosted install" procedure, which involves copying the ISO to the hard drive and installing from within Debian. You probably need to re-partition and/or re-size a partition on the drive to make room for VL, it will need at least 2 GB.

How did you get Debian on there in the first place?Are you planning on keeping Debian and dual boot?

Cool, sounds good. I wouldn't really have much use for Debian after this, so I'd ideally like to dedicate the entire hard drive to VL once this is finished.

A Google search returned a few different ways to partition a drive while keeping the original OS intact--do you have a recommendation of the best way for a bit of a newbie to do it? I installed Debian installed off of the CDROM drive--it was over a year ago, and I remember that there were a few small hiccups, but I forget exactly what they were.

As far as I know, the partition that is being re-sized must be unmounted. In other words, you can not do it from within Debian on your machine. If you can get something like Gparted Magic to run off the cd-rom drive, it has a very nice gui tool for doing so.

Another option is to take the hard drive out of machine, connect it to another one and do the operation on the host OS.